Review of Kaplan and Illouz’s ’What is Sexual Capital?’’

[fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEW[/blanc][/fond noir]

__0__

What is Sexual Capital?

by Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz

Polity Press, Cambridge
2022. 140 pp.,
pb ISBN 9781509552320

Reviewed by Emily Laurent-Monaghan

__0__

Beginning with a note of irony, What is Sexual Capital? poses a seemingly straightforward question: ’what is sexual capital?’ The authors Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz begin by taking stock of recent sociological efforts to pursue the task of doing sociology more joyfully, to pen the social world in a way that will help us better understand sociological phenomena such as ’sexual capital’. The authors criticize previous attempts to make sense of sexual capital, as a ‘sociological metaphor.’ These colloquial approaches seek to articulate the consequences of a ‘world made sexy,’ without a substantive account of how this production is possible in the first place. What is Sexual Capital? belabors a response to its eponymous question, which poses a manifold challenge, with which the authors are poised to grapple given the fidelity of their respective researches. Their intellectual labours dovetail at a particular conjunction: thinking through contemporary neoliberal subjectivity. This timely intervention brings to mind Alenka Zupan